Archive for the 'information policy' category

Net Neutrality FUD all over the place. NCTA has these ads in the WaPo about how 1) you can find everything on the internet and 2) you can't find any reason the internet should be regulated like a utility.

No.

You can, indeed find many well-reasoned essays on why the internet should be regulated like a utility - see, for example, books and essays and blog posts by Lessig, Wu, Cerf, and others. All shared freely. For now.

You can't find everything on the internet, either, and even many "kids today" know this. See.

(reiterating these are just my personal opinion and do not reflect anything from my place of work - if you know what that is - or anything else)

For many years, the US federal government has tried to cut costs by outsourcing anything that isn't inherently governmental, making sure that government doesn't compete with industry, and requiring cost recovery for government agencies that provide services to other agencies (see A-76 ).

Old examples that might have changed: GPO had to do all printing of history books for military historians, but the quality was ok, the distribution was crap, and the DoD history organizations and readers had to pay a lot of money. So what they did when I worked there was to give the book to a university press that would do a decent job with it. The books were not copyrightable anyway because they were work for hire by a government employee. Everyone was happy. Another old example was that Navy was required to send all records to NARA. But then Navy all the sudden had to pay NARA to keep the documents (I think this has changed - my example is from late 1990s). This was things like deck logs. Hugely important documents.

NTIS has long been caught up in this. Agencies producing technical reports are required by law to send them to NTIS (if they are unlimited distribution). NTIS is required to recover the cost of their administration and archiving by selling the documents. This is hard because first, agencies are not thorough in sending stuff to NTIS (often because their central repository isn't even getting copies - even though required by regulations, instructions, etc.) and second, agencies make these documents available for free from their own sites. NTIS also has picked up a few bucks here and there doing web and database consulting and licensing their abstracting and indexing database to vendors who resell to libraries. Why pay for it from a third-party vendor? Cross search with your favorite engineering database. Better search tools.

The results of forcing these agencies - GPO, NTIS, US Courts - to recover their costs are great and they directly work against the open government we need and deserve. It causes the agencies to cut corners and not have the systems they need. It causes customer agencies and citizens alike to distrust and dislike them.

Libraries - like mine - have been burdened by cost recovery, too, and it often signals the beginning of the end. Superficially, makes sense to show how much something is valued and by whom. In practice, you need a lot more accounting systems and controls over the professional workers that prevent them from doing their job. These services are directly in support of strategic requirements (open government and accountability) but are infrastructure. People are blind to infrastructure until it's no longer there. NTIS, PACER, GPO and others need to stop with this cost recovery business (meaning Congress has to pass a law that removes that requirement) and be funded as infrastructure. Outsource to get needed skills you can't hire in government, but be smart about it.

That's not a "you should... ", that's a "do you...", or "should you..."

Centralization of IT services has the potential to save a lot for better quality support. Instead of little groups of servers in re-purposed closets or even decommissioned bathrooms, services are provided out of centralized data centers with UPS and backup power, expert support, etc. A local Maryland county library system is losing its IT - they will all be moved to the county IT department. While I have concerns that the larger department will understand how library systems work - that might be a good thing. Instead of special snowflake IT folks, there will be professionals that can cross train and have more backups. In academic institutions, the servers might be co-located, and the server maintenance might be done by a centralized IT, but there may be library systems employees that do the configuration, customization, and maintain the data.

Goodness knows there were plenty of stories of backups being done manually (or not being done) and also stories of people tripping over power cords, and oh, where I used to work (pre-library days) there was even an asbestos incident trying to put a vent in the decommissioned janitor closet door where the servers were and where they were overheating.

from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/network/cloud, This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

To take that one step further, maybe software as a service makes a lot more sense. Then you've got bigger data centers, with even more specialized staff (specialized in running data centers), fail over plans (you hope), and service level agreements for availability. Libraries generally have good internet. For things like discovery services, this makes a lot of sense to me. For catalogs - I can see it if you're a small organization. I think MPOW is doing this for recruiting software, IT ticketing, and evaluation software (lab-wide - so not just library).

But... when you license a software as a service type thingy or cloud hosted application or whatever the real name for it is... do you do due diligence to check on the security? Do you know that your data that you are required to keep private (patron records are controlled by law in some states) are kept private? What availability is promised? Have there been major outages or (gasp) data losses - what happened and what will prevent that in the future? Can you get your data back out? How is the service paid for - is it metered so if you use more, you pay more? Where exactly are the data centers? Does your employer have rules about your data being overseas? See more explanation of some of these things here (http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/cloud-computing/ )

With all that said, how about you personally? I know a famous librarian who has pulled her stuff from Google servers for various reasons. Amazon web services have had some outages. Most concerning is the recent issue with Dedoose, a software to help with qualitative research. I thought Dedoose sounded awesome and the way you pay for it sounds much more reasonable than the competitors. However, in early May, they had a big big problem. Inside Higher Ed has more on it here.

It sounds like some people might lose weeks worth of coding and analysis. Presumably people would still have the raw data that they had to import originally, but that is a lot of work. People more knowledgeable than I suggested their original set up wasn't sound. I don't know, but if there are all these changes they can make now to make it better, sounds like it wasn't all that.

More broadly - do you trust the cloud? should you? Just because it's a large company doesn't mean they know how to do cloud well. Just because it's a small start-up doesn't mean that they don't. It's not really reasonable to keep local copies of certain things. Maybe multiple cloud services for backups - but make sure they aren't both just front ends for the same cloud! Oy. I feel for the people who lost data.

DRM - digital restrictions management - is a collection of methods to try to "protect" "intellectual property" from being "stolen" or re-shared or re-used ways differing from the intentions of the "owner." DRM prevents legitimate uses and fair uses protected by law. Real pirates circumvent DRM - the only people it harms are those of us who try to obey the laws.

Libraries are between a rock and a hard place. For some materials, the only way to get electronic access is by agreeing to DRM. We like and heartily support vendors that do not use DRM for their ebooks but we're forced to deal with others.

I got an ad in e-mail this morning from O'Reilly bragging about no DRM. That might be true, but they do indeed use technical measures to prevent institutional subscribers from downloading books or printing more than just pages of notes. So don't believe them!

Jenica Rogers, Director of Libraries and Archives at SUNY Potsdam, famous for dropping the ACS package, gave an outstanding Keynote at the Charleston Conference back in November. Her slides are here. There is a video here (only about 30 minutes - watch it). The title here is based on her point that librarians have Stockholm Syndrome and are like deer in the headlights.

Ms Rogers is notable for many things. She is somewhat young to be a Director of Libraries. She shares what it's like to be an administrator and provides wonderful mentoring for academic librarians in the ranks. She's a talented writer and speaker.

She also is quick to call bullshit when vendors play shenanigans thinking they can bully her because she is a woman or because she's younger. She's known for this with ACS and she's also taken on Sage.

This talk was more about how we need to be more than a pocketbook. How we need to call bullshit when vendors don't negotiate honestly. She brings up some horrific examples of contracts saying the library will try to thwart FOIA requests to get what they're paying. Libraries being offered deals if they stop pushing Open Access.

I think this resonated with a lot of people. I know of a society that was pricing based on what they could get away with, not their expenses plus a cushion. I think this is more typical that we know.

Anyhow. A while after, a rebuttal (yes really) came out in Against the Grain. I'll have to admit that I feel protective of Ms Rogers - which she surely doesn't need from me - so I got defensive immediately. But I looked at it again. Surely it's not all goodness and light for these authors! One says in the comments about some problems she has had.

One thing that some commenters miss is that many people use - eek - swear words to express frustration over difficult situations or people. In some parts of the country swear words are part of the fabric of conversation. Her twitter account is her conversation. Her personal blog is conversation. That doesn't make her a bully. I have to admit that I was brought up not to swear and it was jarring to live next to someone from Brooklyn when I first got to college! And then when I went into the Navy... holy cow. (Of course now I can swear with the best of 'em. Who said the Navy wasn't good training?)

I have to admit that I'm a third-party to the negotiations. I come from a rich institution with strong leadership in the library that also won't take crap from vendors. They deal with this so I don't have to, but I will say that I will have to deal with our scientists who are going to miss some journals we're going to cancel next year from the society that insisted on a 16% price increase. I don't know if I'll point this video out to them but I hope some people outside the library world will watch it to understand a little more about what goes on.

This is really just meant to be a pointer post - I'll leave more detailed analysis to others. I do recommend you note this post to LIBLICENSE - someone else standing up.

I made an assumption and was called on it on Liblicense. I was under the impression that to be published you ( or someone from your place of work if it's work-for-hire like at mpow) had to have signed a copyright agreement. Turns out that over time, some publishers have been a little slipshod with this. They didn't follow up or they made some statement that if the author didn't sign, the transfer was assumed or claimed or whatever. Even if they got the agreement, they might not still have it.

Huh. According to Laura Quilter on LibLicense, in the US there has to be a signed agreement. So... makes you wonder... could these people who never signed agreements claim their own copyright back? Post their articles wherever they want? Or maybe it would still have to be the content stripped of all the publisher specific formatting and logo?

When they shut down servers instead of keeping them up with a skeleton crew? LOC data services are down and, as far as I can tell, almost all of NASA's web stuff has been taken down. PubMed is available with a skeleton crew.

Joe Hourclé pointed out on some listservs that they were even given guidance to return an HTTP status of 302 which will essentially tell search engines that they're gone forever.

Luckily, a lot of government-funded science data services are run by universities and research labs that already have their funding and will keep working.

I'm really interested in how DoD, NASA, EPA (because of previous ties), and DoE will respond to the OSTP memo. I know that DoE is getting crap advice from some paid consultants to go with Chorus... but I haven't really heard much about the others.

Today I got a notice about the updated DoD Instruction related to Science and Technology Information (DoDI3200.12). This has been a pretty boilerplate instruction that establishes and sets the rules for DTIC, the Defense Technical Information Center. Keep in mind, too, that DoD components do sometimes (often?) blow off mandatory rules and requirements.

Anyhow. Here are some nice bits (emphasis mine):

Ensure that all results, regardless of outcome, of DoD R&E and studies efforts sponsored in whole or in part by the DoD, are documented and sent to the DTIC in accordance with DoDD 5105.73 (Reference ( af )).

(1) Components ensure that the DoD or extramural organization responsible for each research effort submits to DTIC, STI data that documents the effort to enable others to understand the purpose, scope, approach, results or outcomes, and conclusions or recommendations. The organization may submit any combination of technical reports, technical papers, journal articles , or other types of STI data .

(2) The organization must submit STI data that are primary sources of the information. Merely providing citations to where the information may be found is not sufficient to meet this requirement.

(3) Pending DoD implementation of the Office of Science and Technology Policy Memorandum , (Reference ( ag )), if an extramural organization responsible for a research effort elects to submit materials protected by copyright , such as peer - reviewed journal articles, to DTIC as part of its documentation of the effort, DTIC makes the information available consistent with the license afforded to the government under the terms and conditions of the applicable contract, grant, cooperative agreement, or other type of transaction

MPOW had a trial for Taylor & Francis ebooks - in my professional opinion (not anyone else's) - I find T&F stuff overpriced, difficult to use, and less important than stuff from other publishers. We're quick to call their competitors evil, but at least the platforms work well! With that said, there are a few key journals there that we pretty much need. Some of these books might be useful, too. So I took a look.

ew, ew, ew! The DRM is horrible. View on screen in quick view or pdf view with limited printing, copying/pasting; or download (requires a plugin to Acrobat) and no copying/pasting or printing and it's "saved for a limited time." Just say no!

Oh, and while I'm naming names... McGraw-Hill changed what they offer for their AccessEngineering Library a while ago so that you can't print unless you create a login (boo!). Today an engineer showed what the print out looks like - massive watermark in black obscuring half the page. Nice job, McG-H!